Border Gateway Protocol: Difference between revisions

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The genesis of BGP was in 1989 when [[Kirk Lougheed]], [[Len Bosack]] and [[Yakov Rekhter]] were sharing a meal at an [[IETF]] conference. They famously sketched the outline of their new routing protocol on the back of some napkins, hence often referenced to as the “Two Napkin Protocol”.<ref>{{cite web | last=Jabloner | first=Paula | title=The Two-Napkin Protocol | website=Computer History Museum | date=2015-03-04 | url=https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-two-napkin-protocol/?key=the-two-napkin-protocol | ref={{sfnref|CHM|2015}} | access-date=2024-10-01}}</ref><ref>{{cite web | last=Jabloner | first=Paula | title=The Two-Napkin Protocol #WeAreCisco | website=Cisco | date=2020-07-02 | url=https://weare.cisco.com/c/r/weare/amazing-stories/amazing-things/two-napkin.html | access-date=2024-10-01}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal | title=BGP - A Tale of Two Napkins | journal=The Packet | publisher=Cisco Systems | volume=1 | issue=2 | year=1989 | url=https://weare.cisco.com/c/dam/r/weare/assets/files/packet-winter89.pdf | access-date=2024-10-01}}</ref>

It was [[Species description|first described]] in 1989 in RFC 1105, and has been in use on the Internet since 1994.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://datapath.io/resources/blog/the-history-of-border-gateway-protocol/|title=The History of Border Gateway Protocol|work=blog.datapath.io|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201029233343/https://datapath.io/resources/blog/the-history-of-border-gateway-protocol/|archive-date=29 October 2020}}</ref> [[IPv6]] BGP was first defined in {{IETF RFC|1654}} in 1994, and it was improved to {{IETF RFC|2283|link=no}} in 1998.

The current version of BGP is version 4 (BGP4), which was first published as {{IETF RFC|1654|link=no}} in 1994, subsequently updated by {{IETF RFC|1771 |link=no}} in 1995 and {{IETF RFC|4271|link=no}} in 2006.<ref>{{cite IETF |RFC=4271 |title=A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)}}</ref> RFC 4271 corrected errors, clarified ambiguities and updated the specification with common industry practices. The major enhancement of BGP4 was the support for [[Classless Inter-Domain Routing]] (CIDR) and use of [[route aggregation]] to decrease the size of [[routing table]]s. {{IETF RFC|4271|link=no}} allows BGP4 to carry a wide range of [[IPv4]] and IPv6 "address families". It is also called the Multiprotocol Extensions which is [[Multiprotocol BGP]] (MP-BGP).